820 S. Michigan Avenue
"The challenge before us is the challenge of returning to the fundamental principles of American business. The first principle, without which all other principles are useless, is to identify with consumers. This means, among other things, that you must put yourself in the consumer's shoes, to see what he sees, to feel what she feels, and to want what he or she wants." --John H. Johnson
Johnson Publishing Company, Inc. is the world's largest black-owned publishing company. It is the home of Ebony, Jet, and EM magazines, as well as Fashion Fair Cosmetics, Supreme Beauty Products, Ebony Fashion Fair, and the Johnson Publishing Company Book Division.
Humble Beginnings, 1942
Johnson Publishing Company was founded in November 1942 by John H. Johnson--who was working part time as an office boy for Supreme Life Insurance Company of America, located in Chicago, Illinois--and his wife, Eunice. Johnson's job was to clip magazine and newspaper articles about the black community. As he clipped, the idea for a black-oriented magazine came to mind. Using his mother's furniture as collateral, he secured a loan of $500. He then mailed out $2 charter subscription offers to potential subscribers. Over 3,000 replies came in, and the $6,000 was used to print the first issue of Negro Digest, a magazine based on the popular Reader's Digest.
Negro Digest Publishing Co. was born. Immediately facing obstacles such as finding a landlord willing to rent him office space in a not-yet-desegregated United States, Johnson managed to secure a room in the private law office of Earl B. Dickerson, on the second floor of his employer's building, the Supreme Life Insurance Company. In 1943 Johnson purchased a building at 5619 South State Street, to house the fledgling company. In 1949 the company converted a funeral parlor at 1820 South Michigan Avenue into office space and moved there, a location which would remain the company's headquarters to the end of the 20th century, although it would grow to be 11 stories tall. Along the way, Negro Digest, which had a circulation at one time of 100,000 subscribers, was renamed Black World. In the 1970s, the readership dwindled, and the magazine was finally canceled in 1975.
However by that time, the company was going strong with other products. In 1945 Johnson launched Ebony, a magazine patterned after Life, but focusing on the black community, culture, and achievements. It was an immediate success and remained the company's flagship publication into the 21st century, with a readership at one point of over 1.3 million. In 1951 Johnson created another magazine, called Jet, a celebrity-oriented magazine focusing on black entertainers and public figures. For nearly 20 years, these two magazines were the only publications for blacks in the United States.
Unable to obtain advertising in those years, Johnson created the Beauty Star mail-order company and began advertising its products, such as haircare products, wigs, and vitamins in his own magazines. In 1947 the company picked up its first major advertising account in Zenith Radio and, after sending a salesman to Detroit every week for nearly ten years, finally managed to sign Chrysler Corporation in 1954. The magazine drew the talents of many people, including author Era Bell Thompson (1905-1986), who served as associate editor of Ebony from 1948 to 1951, and comanaging editor from 1951 to 1964, before becoming international editor for the company thereafter.
In 1957 Ebony Fashion Fair blazed a trail of fashion excellence that has endured the test of time. Four gorgeous black models brought fashion excitement to audiences in ten cities--Chicago; Indianapolis; New Orleans; Baltimore; Los Angeles; Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland, Ohio; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C.--where they displayed an array of dazzling American designer fashions. The late Freda DeKnight, Ebony magazine's home service director and Ebony Fashion Fair's first commentator, paraded fashions in homespun rhetoric weaving imaginary tales about each model and fashion. The 41st annual tour took place in the 1998--99 fashion season, with audiences still experiencing lively commentary, enriched with synthesizer programming, a drummer, a bassist, R&B, jazz, and song and dance routines performed by talented members of the troupe. Thirteen models moved swiftly down the runways and across stages in 1998--99, emphasizing elegance and excitement as they displayed American and European fashions brilliant with color, detail, and pizzazz. At the conclusion of the 40th annual tour, funds raised since inception by sponsors of the show had reached $45 million, all designated for various charities and scholarships. By then the show had given 540 young people and 112 wardrobe assistants the opportunity to visit cities and countries of many cultures, and had been sponsored by over 180 prestigious social and civic organizations, including the United Negro College Fund, the NAACP, and the Urban League.
Johnson quickly soared to fame. By the early 1960s, he was one of the most prominent black men in the country. In 1963, he and John F. Kennedy posed together to publicize a special issue of Ebony which was celebrating The Emancipation Proclamation. In 1972, U.S. magazine publishers gave him accolades as Publisher of the Year. He would also go on to become chairman and CEO of Supreme Life Insurance Company, his first employer.
In 1973 the company began publishing Ebony Jr! (now defunct), a magazine designed to provide "positive black images" for pre-teens. Johnson branched out into new media formats when he began buying radio stations, including WJPC, Chicago's first black-owned station. The following year, the company purchased WLOU in Louisville, Kentucky, and in the mid-1980s, the company acquired WLNR in Lansing, Illinois, which was merged with WJPC in 1992; the combined station was sold in 1995. Also in 1973, Fashion Fair Cosmetics was founded by the company in answer to the problems that women of color had in finding shades to match their skin tones. The company would go on to compete successfully against such huge competitors as Revlon and Johnson Products of Chicago, an unrelated company. Fashion Fair would grow to become the world's number one cosmetics company for women of color, with annual sales in 1982 reaching over $30 million, and the products being sold in over 2,500 stores throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
In the early 1980s, Johnson began to groom his daughter Linda, who received her M.B.A. at Northwestern University's J.L. Kellogg School of Management, to take over the business. Linda started working summers for the company at the age of 15, eventually becoming fashion coordinator for both magazines and cosmetics. Linda Johnson Rice would go on to become president and chief operating officer of the company, as well as a director for such companies as Bausch & Lomb. In 1981 Johnson's adopted son, John E., a staff photographer for the company, died of sickle-cell anemia, at age 25. That year, the company's total revenues reached $81 million. The following year, the company's revenue grew to $102 million.
In 1985 the company launched a new magazine called EM (Ebony Man), targeted mainly at the growing ranks of increasingly affluent buppies (black urban professionals). Like a black version of GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly), the inaugural November issue was chock-full of photos of immaculate male models bedecked in the latest fashions of clothing, with a healthy dollop of fashion and grooming tips, and filled with articles on health, fitness, personal finance, and shopping techniques.
In 1988 Johnson was inducted into the Publishing Hall of Fame, along with such other luminaries as Harold K. Guinzburg, founder of Viking Press and The Literary Guild; Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribners Sons; Richard Leo Simon and Max Lincoln Schuster, founders of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; and William Randolph Hearst, founder of Hearst Publishing Corporation. That year, the company had total revenues of $215 million, making it the second largest black-owned business in the United States, behind Reginald Lewis's TLC Beatrice International Holdings. By this time, Johnson was also on the boards of Greyhound and two of his first advertisers, Chrysler and Zenith. The following year, Johnson was the recipient of IABC's Excellence in Communication "EXCEL" Award. That year, he was also the only black man on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States. Johnson was also awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
Also in 1989, Johnson wrote his autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, with assistance from longtime Ebony editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. In the autobiography, Johnson explained how he got started. "In organizing the staff [of my first magazine], I reached out to everybody, for I knew nothing about magazine publishing and editing.... When all else failed, I looked in the phone book and called an expert. Since I had nothing to lose, I always started at the top. I received valuable advice from Henry Luce of Time-Life and Gardner Cowles of Look.... It was hard to get through to Luce, but ... I used a simple approach that almost always worked. I simply told the secretary or aide that I was the president--I stressed the word president--of my company. 'It is,' I said, 'a small company but I am the president, and I want to talk to your president... If the president of the smallest country in the world comes to Washington, our president, as a matter of public policy and protocol will see him. So it seems to me that your president, in the American tradition, will see me for a few minutes if you pass this request on and tell him that I don't want a donation or a job.' I used that on Henry Luce's secretary, and I got in to see him."
In 1991 the company sold its controlling interest in the last minority-owned insurance company in Illinois, Supreme Life Insurance, Johnson's first employer, to Chicago-based Unitrin, a life, health, and property insurance company. Total revenues for 1991 climbed to $281 million. Also that year, the company entered into a joint venture with catalog company Spiegel Inc. to develop a fashion line and mail-order catalog aimed at black women, launching a mail-order catalog called E Style to that effect in 1993. An accompanying credit card with the "E Style" imprint appeared in 1994.
In October 1992, the company introduced "Ebone," a new line of cosmetics for women of color, as well as a three-part videotape series called The Ebony/Jet Guide to Black Excellence, which profiled black leaders, entrepreneurs, and entertainers to help provide positive role models for young people.
In November 1995, the company expanded its operations with the launch of Ebony South Africa, a counterpart to the U.S. version of the magazine. Because trade tariffs on incoming products to South Africa were taxed at 100 percent of the cost, Johnson Publishing subsidiary EBCO International teamed up with five South African companies, with Johnson holding 51 percent of the joint venture, in order to avoid losing money on the project. The company invested $2--$3 million on facilities, equipment, and staffing, opening editorial offices in Sandton, near Johannesburg. In the inaugural November 1995 issue, Bishop Desmond Tutu related the story of when he saw his first issue of Ebony, which had Jackie Robinson on the cover, when the cleric was nine years old and living in a ghetto township located some 30 miles outside of Johannesburg.
Total sales for 1997 reached $361.1 million, a 10.9 percent growth over the previous year, in which the company ranked 28th overall in magazine publishing companies by advertising revenue, with $26.8 million for the first half of 1996. However, competition in the black-oriented magazine industry finally began to catch up with Johnson Publishing Company. With a plethora of new titles appearing, such as Black Enterprise, and the rise of other black-oriented entertainment and informational vehicles such as Black Entertainment Television (BET), circulation of Ebony dropped seven percent.
Still, the company bounced back without noticeable difficulty: all three major magazines (Ebony, Jet, and EM) continued to draw advertisers and readership, as the company entered the 21st century poised to sustain its long history of leadership within the black-oriented publishing industry.
Principal Subsidiaries: Ebony Fashion Fair; Fashion Fair Cosmetics; Mahogany Travel Service Inc.; Supreme Beauty Products; EBCO International (South Africa; 51%).
Principal Divisions: Johnson Publishing Company Book Division.
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